ABSTRACT
Less than a month before his assassination, on January 24, 1965, Malcolm X lectured to an audience gathered for a public meeting at the Audubon Hotel in Harlem, New York, on a subject that, when the lecture was published in 1967, would be called “Afro-American history.” Malcolm intended a public lecture that would “speak on” this history, “from the ancient black civilizations through slavery to the present day.” As a twentieth-century self-taught black historian, Malcolm was concerned that his audience understood what one was doing “when you deal with the past.” He thus explained that with the past “you’re dealing with history” or with “the origin of a thing.” Further, he added “When you know the origin, you know the cause. If you don’t know the origin, you don’t know the cause … when you know the origin, then you get a better understanding of the causes that produce whatever originated there and its reason for originating and its reason for being” (quoted in Breitman 1967, 2-4).1 This essay investigates the origins of the idea to publish encyclopedic knowledge about Africans and the diaspora of African people.
